The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

Realists do not fear the results of their study.

In the revolt against idealism the ambiguities of the word experience have been perceived with the result that realists have more and more avoided the word.

Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description as science writers but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We're dreamers you see but we're also realists of a sort.

Sometimes the only realists are the dreamers.